Web 1.0 - (Elham Naseri)
Web 1.0 Defined It's hard to define Web 1.0 for several reasons. First, Web 2.0 doesn't refer to a specific advance in Web technology. Instead, Web 2.0 refers to a set of techniques for Web page design and execution. Second, some of these techniques have been around since the World Wide Web first launched, so it's impossible to separate Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in a time line. The definition of Web 1.0 completely depends upon the definition of Web 2.0. With that in mind, if Web 2.0 is a collection of approaches that are the most effective on the World Wide Web, then Web 1.0 includes everything else. As for what it means to be "effective," Tim O'Reilly says that it's providing users with an engaging experience so that they'll want to return to the Web page in the future. Here's a collection of strategies O'Reilly considers to be part of the Web 1.0 philosophy: *'Web 1.0 sites are static.' They contain information that might be useful, but there's no reason for a visitor to return to the site later. An example might be a personal Web page that gives information about the site's owner, but never changes. A Web 2.0 version might be a blog or MySpace account that owners can frequently update. *'Web 1.0 sites aren't interactive.' Visitors can only visit these sites; they can't impact or contribute to the sites. Most organizations have profile pages that visitors can look at but not impact or alter, whereas a wiki allows anyone to visit and make changes. *'Web 1.0 applications are proprietary.' Under the Web 1.0 philosophy, companies develop software applications that users can download, but they can't see how the application works or change it. A Web 2.0 application is an open source program, which means the source code for the program is freely available. Users can see how the application works and make modifications or even build new applications based on earlier programs. For example, Netscape Navigator was a proprietary Web browser of the Web 1.0 era. Firefox follows the Web 2.0 philosophy and provides developers with all the tools they need to create new Firefox applications. Is it always a bad idea to take a Web 1.0 approach in Web design? Find out on the next page. Tiny Bubbles in the Web Tim O'Reilly says that by looking at the Web sites that were around before and after the so-called dot-com bubble burst, people can see which Web strategies work best. By 2000, the Web had been around for several years and many investors were pouring money into small, unproven Web companies. Many of these companies had no proven means of generating revenue, and eventually the wave of speculative investments crashed. O'Reilly argues that the Web companies that survived the crash did so because their approach was better suited to the Web. In his Web 2.0 explanation, he says that the companies that are now thriving after the dot-com crash learned valuable lessons from the Web 1.0 companies that are no longer around. When Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media coined the term "Web 2.0," he probably didn't know he was stirring up a hornets' nest. He was trying to come up with a catchy name for an Internet conference focused on the most effective ways to use the Web. The term caught on, and some people began to use it beyond its original purpose. Ever since the phrase "Web 2.0" gained traction, people have debated its definition. More than a few Internet experts question whether Web 2.0 even has a meaning at all. [http://www.howstuffworks.com/enlarge-image.htm Web Page Image Gallery] Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, took a stab at defining Web 2.0 more than a year after the first Web 2.0 Conference. He posted an explanation on his blog that spanned five pages of text and used a lot of marketing terms and jargon. Some people might find O'Reilly's explanation more confusing than helpful, but his main point was that Web 2.0 refers to people making connections with other people through the Web, as they do on these Web sites: *Social networking sites, like MySpace or Facebook *Blogs and micro-blogs, like LiveJournal or Twitter *Sites that allow users to contribute content, like wikis *Sites that let users share content, like YouTube But defining Web 2.0 was only half of the problem. The other half had to do with the use of "2.0." The number suggested that this was a new version of the World Wide Web. If Web 2.0 was real, what was Web 1.0? Were there still Web pages on the Internet that fell into the Web 1.0 classification? If you search the Web, you'll find no shortage of answers to these questions. Unfortunately, there's no agreement on the answers. We can understand what Web 1.0 is only if we assume that there's a Web 2.0. In this article, we'll use O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0 to figure out what Web 1.0 means. In the next section, we'll look at the definitive explanation for Web 1.0. The term web 1.0 refers to the first version of the web, sometimes also known as the informational web, which developed from 1991 onwards, as distinct from [http://e-language.wikispaces.com/web2.0 web 2.0], the social web, which emerged around the year 2000. Web 1.0 was essentially a source of information created by a small number of authors for a very large number of users. It consisted largely of static webpages with little room for real interactivity. Thus, it functioned much like a large reference book, or indeed a whole library of reference books. Until the emergence of web 2.0, of course, we didn't need to talk about versions of the web: therefore, the term web 1.0 was created retrospectively after the advent of web 2.0 to help differentiate the informational from the social web. The Google Trends diagram at the bottom of this page shows the relative incidence of Google searches for the terms 'web 1.0', 'web 2.0' and 'web 3.0' over the years 2004-2011. It can be seen that searches for web 2.0 became popular before searches for web 1.0. The usage of the term web 2.0 is now also tailing off, partly due to the rise of alternative terms (such as 'social media') and partly because it's no longer necessary to specify that we're talking about web 2.0, since these days it's simply assumed that when we refer to the web, we are referring largely to the social web. It's important to realise that web 1.0 hasn't disappeared, though. It still exists but is now overlaid with the more social web 2.0. For a succinct but informative list of comparisons between web 1.0 and web 2.0, see Joe Drumgoole's Copacetic blog entry Web 2.0 vs web 1.0 or Tim O'Reilly's What is web 2.0. For a more complex design-oriented comparison, see MacManus & Porter's Web 2.0 for designers. For a thorough overview, see Cormode & Krishnamurthy's Key differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Compared to pre-digital education, web 1.0 offers advantages in terms of student autonomy, use of authentic materials and scenarios, exposure to multiliteracies, and a limited level of interactivity. However, the main educational uses of web 1.0 tend to fall into two categories: information retrieval (as in webquests) or rote training (as in drills). These correspond to very traditional models of pedagogy: a transmission model in the former case, a behaviourist training model in the latter. Notwithstanding more sophisticated uses (such as webquests for problem-based learning, or drill exercises for guided discovery) such activities are not so clearly aligned with the social constructivist model which underpins much of the educational use of web 2.0. 0cm 0cm 0cm 15.0pt" width="100%" Basic Definitions: Web 1.0, Web. 2.0, Web 3.0 "What do people mean when they talk about the Web 2.0?" is a query we receive repeatedly, and probably has as many answers as the number of people out there using the term. However, since talk about the Web 3.0 has surfaced in the last year or so, a whole new level of confusion seems to have set in. In an effort to help people understand the ideas behind buzzwords like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, let's go through what exactly these terms mean (if anything), and how they apply to your ecommerce business. A broad definition I want to make it clear at the start that this article is meant to be a broad definition of the challenges that cause people to think in terms of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Since these are buzzwords and not clearly defined terms, think of this as an attempt to provide a bird's-eye view of the ever-changing lay of the land on the web. In an effort to create discreet "versions" of the web that can be compared, I will borrow from the W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee's notion of the read-write web, which is often used as a way of explaining what Web 2.0 means. The first implementation of the web represents the Web 1.0, which, according to Berners-Lee, could be considered the "read-only web." In other words, the early web allowed us to search for information and read it. There was very little in the way of user interaction or content contribution. However, this is exactly what most website owners wanted: Their goal for a website was to establish an online presence and make their information available to anyone at any time. I like to call this "brick-and-mortar thinking applied to the web," and the web as a whole hasn't moved much beyond this stage yet. Shopping carts are Web 1.0 Shopping cart applications, which most ecommerce website owners employ in some shape or form, basically fall under the category of Web 1.0. The overall goal is to present products to potential customers, much as a catalog or a brochure does — only, with a website, you can also provide a method for anyone in the world to purchase products. The web provided a vector for exposure, and removed the geographical restrictions associated with a brick-and-mortar business. Currently, we are seeing the infancy of the Web 2.0, or the "read-write" web if we stick to Berners-Lee's method of describing it. The newly-introduced ability to contribute content and interact with other web users has dramatically changed the landscape of the web in a short time. It has even more potential that we have yet to see. For example, just look at YouTube and MySpace, which rely on user submissions, and the potenital becomes more clear. The Web 2.0 appears to be a welcome response to a demand by web users that they be more involved in what information is available to them. Many views of Web 2.0 Now, it's important to realize that there are a staggering number of definitions of what constitutes a "Web 2.0 application." For example, the perception exists that just because a website is built using a certain technology (like Ruby on Rails), or because it employs Ajax in its interface, it is a Web 2.0 application. From the general, bird's-eye view we are taking, this is not the case; our definition simply requires that users be able to interact with one another or contribute content. Developers, for example, have a much more rigid definition of Web 2.0 than average web users, and this can lead to confusion. This in turn leads us to the rumblings and mumblings we have begun to hear about Web 3.0, which seems to provide us with a guarantee that vague web-versioning nomenclature is here to stay. By extending Tim Berners-Lee's explanations, the Web 3.0 would be something akin to a "read-write-execute" web. However, this is difficult to envision in its abstract form, so let's take a look at two things I predict will form the basis of the Web 3.0 — semantic markup and web services. Semantic markup refers to the communication gap between human web users and computerized applications. One of the largest organizational challenges of presenting information on the web is that web applications aren't able to provide context to data, and, therefore, can't really understand what is relevant and what is not. Through the use of some sort of semantic markup, or data interchange formats, data could be put in a form not only accessible to humans via natural language, but able to be understood and interpreted by software applications as well. While it is still evolving, this notion — formatting data to be understood by software agents — leads to the "execute" portion of our definition, and provides a way to discuss web services. Web 3.0 A web service is a software system designed to support computer-to-computer interaction over the Internet. Web services are not new and usually take the form of an Application Programming Interface (API). The popular photography-sharing website Flickr provides a web service whereby developers can programmatically interface with Flickr to search for images. Currently, thousands of web services are available. However, in the context of Web 3.0, they take center stage. By combining a semantic markup and web services, the Web 3.0 promises the potential for applications that can speak to each other directly, and for broader searches for information through simpler interfaces. What's important to understand, I think, is that the nomenclature with which we describe these differing philosophies should not be taken too seriously. Just because a website does not employ Web 2.0 features does not make it obsolete. After all, a small ecommerce website trying to sell niche products may not have any business need for users to submit content or to be able to interact with each other. Most importantly, you don't need to upgrade anything, get new software or anything like that. These are abstract ideas used to contemplate the challenges developers face on the web in addition to theories about how to address them. (Coming of Age with the Internet: Remembering Web 1.0 If you comb through the Google Internet Cache—the Roman ruins of the 21st Century— you might stumble across long-abandoned GeoCities pages, lost Usenet postings, and other defunct websites. Over a decade after they were first created, some of your co-workers’ instant-message handles probably still channel the zeitgeist of junior high school. Dig into that forgotten desk drawer and you’ll find dozens of America Online CD’s stashed alongside floppy disks, joysticks, and tape drives. Web 2.0 long since came and conquered. Billions of AOL CD’s now sit in landfills, Geocities is offline, and no one has used a floppy disc in years. But in the mid-90’s, when I came of age, the Internet was more a curiosity than a necessity. Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia didn’t exist, and the so-called information superhighway was mostly empty promise. It was the Internet’s Age of Innocence. In 1994, all of ten years old, I signed up for America Online. It wasn’t a simple process. After calling AOL’s toll-free line—and paying for the service by phone—I dialed up, the modem hissed, and I was promptly disconnected. Another few tries and I was in, connected at 2400 baud—not that I had any idea what “baud” meant. The modem’s ubiquitously loud hiss, amplified over the computer speakers, was the sound of the future. AOL even provided graphics: when we signed on, we were treated to spectacular vision of a lightning bolt crashing. Now this, this was the information superhighway. It was the Wild West out there. AOL denied me my avatar of choice, just as it did for millions of other Americans. In its infinite wisdom, AOL invariably suggested a four or five-digit number following any screenname. The implication was that we were part of a mass movement—that yes, there really were eighteen hundred and thirty-two Jacob Savages who had already signed up for AOL, and that I was privileged enough to be the 1833rd. Once connected—and during peak hours, it was virtually impossible to get through on the first try—there wasn’t all that much to do. Back in 1994, AOL wasn’t even hooked into the World Wide Web—you couldn’t browse web pages—so we did the only thing we could do: we went into chat rooms and pretended to be people we weren’t. There were all sorts of chat rooms: Teen chats, Jewish Teen Chats, General Chats, Space Enthusiast chats. It didn’t take long to discover that on the World Wide Web, you could be anyone (it never occurred to us that the people we were chatting with might be impersonating other people themselves). Dozens of pre-teens from across the nation flooded these chat rooms. Every 30 seconds or so, someone would demand an A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) check. The responses flooded in: 13/m/NY, 12/f/Minnesota, 11/m/Los Angeles, etc. Having ascertained these fundamentals, we’d ask one another if we were hot, or popular, or what life was like in Minneapolis or New York or Los Angeles. Anticipating the future of social networking, AOL even allowed us to create “profiles” (favorite movie: “Austin Powers”), though of course there were no photos involved. Through good fortune and no small amount charm (I was, after all, a 12/M/NYC), I scored a couple of internet girlfriends. LuvsGuys1 was my first love: a hot blonde on the J.V. cheerleading squad from Arizona. We took each other’s mutual good-lookingness on faith. Once a week for about a year or so, we’d message each other. We had cybersex once, but it was pretty awkward. I don’t think we got past second base. Eventually AOL sped up its connections and opened itself up to the World Wide Web. No longer forced to malinger at 2400 baud, I upgraded my dial-up modem to 56K (though it never connected at 56K, always at 28.8 or 49.33). For the virile pre-teen, more bandwidth meant one very important thing: more pornography. It no longer took ten minutes to download a single JPEG, and I was in heaven. I downloaded multiple password-protecting applications to protect my digital porn collection from my parents’ prying eyes. With six to eight JPEGS stored on my hard drive, I wasn’t taking any chances. I didn’t only look at porn (though before Google’s life-changing algorithm, pretty much any search produced a mountain of pornography results). I also visited websites about the theoretics of time travel. Sometimes I’d head over to the People’s Republic of North Korea’s website (still in 1995 beta mode) and think about buying a t-shirt or maybe a nuclear bomb. Ebay came online right around then. It was easy to game the system: you could write positive feedback about anyone, regardless of whether you’d actually sold them anything. My friends and I left each other dozens of positive feedback. To this day, my “power seller” rating is at least partly a result of those good old days. In its way, downloading porn was a lot like a having unprotected sex: it gave your computer venereal diseases. For every couple of hours I spent downloading porn, my computer contracted a virus. Hackers, of course, were the ones supplying us with this endless stream of venereal disease. In the mid 90’s, hackers ruled supreme. There were newspaper articles about hackers, movies about hackers, after-school specials about hackers. They were superhuman wizards who could bring down the U.S. government with just eight keystrokes. The paranoia was so rampant that Stephen Glass—the now-infamous New Republic plagiarist-reporter—was able to claim that hackers, like actors and athletes, had their own agents: “hackers’ agent, whose business card is emblazoned with the slogan ‘super-agent to super-nerds,’ claims to represent nearly 300 of them, ages nine to 68,” Glass wrote in 1998. That Glass’ over-the-top article was published is both a testament to reckless fact-checking at The New Republic and to a broader national ignorance about the Internet. Of course, Google didn’t exist yet, so there was no way to google Glass and find out that everything he wrote was a demented lie. On the World Wide Web, aka the information superhighway, anything was possible, even though nothing SPECIFIC was particularly possible. Hackers hated AOL. In 1995, thanks to AOL’s notoriously poor code and a legendary hacker group known only as “Warez”—and despite having no programming skills whatsoever—I joined the glorious underworld. “Warez” released a program called “AOHell,” which enabled the wannabe hacker to “email-bomb” people to overflow their inbox, to “IM-bomb” people to boot them offline, and to “phish” for AOL passwords. I tried downloading AOHell about nine times and probably contracted several viruses in the process. But then I successfully IM-bombed a girl I liked and kicked her off AOL for an hour or so. It was totally worth it. AOHell was just the beginning of my semi-legal Internet activity. The first song I ever pirated was The Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” The whole thing was rather low-fi. I played the song on from sort of proto-streaming website—the quality was awful. I then took my tape cassette and recorded the computer speakers playing the song. Let’s just say, the record companies should have seen the writing on the wall. Before long, my Warez hacker friends had organized private chat rooms devoted to pirating music. Automated “bots” would email out a list of songs. I’d request song #234 or #538 (they only stocked pop hits, so it would inevitably be something along the lines of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful”), and the bot would email me the MP3 or WAV file. My iPod is still stocked with a few of these late 90’s hacker hits (here’s looking at you, Meredith Brooks). In those pre-iPod days, my 256-slot CD cases were quickly overtaken by CD-R’s, sharpies, and “Mix CD’s.” Web 1.0, like our adolescence, ended with a thud. We went off to college, freeing ourselves from both our parents’ rules and their slow Internet connections. We were pirates finally allowed on the high seas: Napster, Limewire, and then DC++, allowed us to download all the music and video we wanted. Before long, Google, Facebook, Youtube, and Wikipedia came and swept out the remnants of Web 1.0. When we arrived as freshmen, we left our laptops home during class — the lecture halls didn’t have wireless, and we didn’t want to be the “weird kid” who brought his computer everywhere. By the time we graduated, though, our campuses were all wired, and we were tethered to our screens. But even as the Internet fulfilled previously unimaginable possibilities—videos, social networking, information on demand—the innocence of its original promise seemed a bit lost. This isn’t an elegy to a lost age in which my friends and I played stickball in the street and/or sat around the arcade playing pong. But my generation sat at a liminal threshold, coming of age with the Internet, not before and not after. Back in the mid-to-late-90′s, the Internet, like pick-up basketball or Super Mario Brothers, was just another thing that you did sometime.